If you have a website then you’ve been told to do “SEO”, officially known as Search Engine Optimization.
Is it actually vital? YES. But what is it and how does it work?
With millions of websites online, search engines need a way to quickly scan ALL websites and pull up the ones that are most relevant to what what is being searched for.
Let’s use Google as an example since it’s the most commonly used search engine.
Google has programmed an exact algorithm that will pull and display what it believes to be the relevant websites that match a search, in order of priority.
As Google only lists about 10 – 15 websites on each page, the ones it considers to be most relevant to the search being conducted are the ones that get seen the most – those are the ones on the FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE, which is where you want to be.
What shows on that first page of Google differs depending on what words you put into the search bar, your location and your search history.
For example, if someone in California searches “Car Repair”, they will see different results than if someone search the same thing in Kansas. Now, due to search history and various websites people browse, even someone in California can get slightly varied results.
In every case Google is trying to decide, of these millions of websites which are most relevant.
So how do they do that? Unless you work in Google’s programming department you most likely won’t know the answer to that question. BUT DON’T LOSE HOPE. There are definite actions you can take, and that we at Key Marketing Strategies can tactfully manage, that will help get your website considered the “most relevant” when people search for services.
So what is SEO?
SEO is all those actions and things that you need to do that help you be considered more or most relevant when people search for some service or product that you offer. In the next post, you can find a few basics that will help you understand how this works and things you can do.